Foreign Agents

It's time for a confession. I have worked as a "foreign agent."



Both of these organizations work in partnership with people on the ground to transform societies. They don't impose their philosophy on the unwilling. They are selective in their approach, seeking out like-minded individuals and groups (or, in some cases, parties willing to dialogue). As a facilitator of this work, I've linked arms with anti-military-base activists, environmentalists, women's movement representatives, and minority rights advocates.

I'm proud of this work.


At the end of last year, China introduced a draft law that forbids foreign NGOs that engage in activities contrary to "Chinese society's moral customs." In Russia, organizations that receive foreign funding must register as "foreign agents." Egypt, Bolivia, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe have passed similar measures.


Are they right to be worried?

The Rise and Fall of Civil Society

The 1980s and 1990s were golden years for transnational civil society.


With the end of the Cold War, transnational civil society tackled other issues -- trade agreements, corporate conduct, LGBT rights. The World Social Forum took off, spawning numerous regional gatherings. People power, in the form of civil society organizations, came to represent a new superpower.

And then something happened.


Some of the democratic states, like Slovakia and Croatia, temporarily relapsed into semi-authoritarianism. In the Middle East and North Africa, governments accused popular movements of being stalking horses for Islamic fundamentalists. The Chinese government's suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests on June 4, 1989 began to look less like an aberration and more like the shape of things to come.


Governments intolerant of opposition now had a new weapon they could use against groups they didn't like: label them terrorists.




Solidifying Their Gains




In 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev introduced amendments that decreased some of the reporting requirements. But in 2012, shortly after taking office as president, Vladimir Putin instituted the law on "foreign agents," which once again handicapped organizations that receive money from outside donors. In effect, Putin's law declared that these organizations engaged in domestic espionage and were thus under suspicion.

The law had an immediate dampening effect on Russian civil society (or, rather, that part of Russian civil society critical of the government). As John Dalhuisen of Amnesty Internationalnotes, "The 'foreign agents law' was designed to stigmatize and discredit NGOs engaged in human rights, election monitoring and other critical work. It is providing a perfect pretext for fining and closing critical organizations and will cut often vital funding streams."

Many groups refused to register as foreign agents. Quite a few organizations, including an election watchdog group and an LGBT film festival, went belly up. There are 51 organizations currently on the "foreign agents" list, including most recently the Russian chapter of Transparency International.

Putin's greatest opposition has come from the critical intelligentsia. The law on "foreign agents" effectively targets this narrow band of activists by putting them under close state surveillance, calling into question their activities, and restricting their sources of money. Such a law doesn't abolish civil society. It simply encourages some types of public activity -- by religious organizations, businesses, pro-government groups -- and discourages others.

The new Chinese draft law, meanwhile, comes in the wake of protests in Hong Kong and Taiwan -- nicknamed the "umbrella" and the "sunflower" movements, respectively -- as well as earlier efforts to monitor finances.

It also follows a general crackdown on civil society organizations. The Washington Postreports that in 2014 "members of the grass-roots New Citizens Movement were given lengthy jail terms for suggesting that government officials declare their assets; a network of mobile rural libraries was shut down; and several members of the Transition Institute of Social and Economic Research in Beijing, a group that looked into exploitation of vulnerable groups, disappeared into detention."

Russia and China are the leading countries in this new wave of legal restrictions, but they're not alone.

According to a useful list assembled by the International Center for Not-for Profit Law, the Bolivian law allows the government to dissolve organizations. The Ethiopian law limits foreign contributions to 10 percent of a group's budget. In Turkmenistan, a government commission must approve beforehand foreign-funded projects. In Ecuador and Venezuela, a wide range of organizations can't receive any foreign funding at all.



The Hard Side of Soft Power


But perhaps these states have a point. Just because semi-authoritarian leaders are paranoid doesn't mean that some people aren't out to get them.


Governments use all manner of "soft power" levers to achieve their ends. Still, with their new laws, the semi-authoritarians are conflating two different types of subversion.



The challenge is that sometimes these two categories are conflated in reality, and not just in the imaginations of the semi-authoritarians. Civic groups committed to universal values will sometimes (inadvertently or deliberately) work on behalf of the interests of foreign states. And sometimes funding from governments -- from Canada or Sweden or Norway or even sometimes the United States -- falls into the second category and has nothing to do with advancing the specific interests of the state.






Much has been made of a report last year of the funding that foreign governments are pouring into U.S. think tanks. My think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, doesn't take any government funding, domestic or foreign, and this ensures our independence.


Other money sources make me uncomfortable, for instance from the Saudi government. I wouldn't accept those funds myself, but I also wouldn't support restricting the flow. When it comes to such financing, transparency is absolutely necessary. In that way, we can judge on a case-by-case basis whether such "foreign agents" are acting on behalf of narrow state interests or on behalf of the broader concerns of humanity.

Crossposted with Foreign Policy In Focus